Subject: /bin/tempfile removed that is needed by many scripts

From: Klaus Ethgen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2021 07:49:32 +0200

Package: debianutils
Version: 5.0.1-1
Severity: critical

Many scripts uses tempfile to get a temporary file. Version 5.0.1-1
removed it so many parts of the system fail including init scripts,
xsessions and many more.

-- System Information:
Distributor ID:	Devuan
Description:	Devuan GNU/Linux 4 (chimaera)
Release:	4
Codename:	n/a
Architecture: x86_64

Kernel: Linux 5.13.4 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_FIRMWARE_WORKAROUND, TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

Versions of packages debianutils depends on:
ii  libc6  2.31-15

debianutils recommends no packages.

debianutils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information
-- 
Klaus Ethgen                                       http://www.ethgen.ch/
pub  4096R/4E20AF1C 2011-05-16            Klaus Ethgen <[email-masked]>
Fingerprint: 85D4 CA42 952C 949B 1753  62B3 79D0 B06F 4E20 AF1C

---

From: Mark Hindley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2021 07:48:24 +0100

Control: reassign -1 x11-common
Control: tags -1 debian
Control: forwarded -1 https://bugs.debian.org/992385

Klaus,

> removed it so many parts of the system fail including init scripts,

Thanks for this. Debianutils is not a forked package and Devuan uses Debian's
packages directly without recompilation. Therefore, in principle, this should be
reported to Debian's BTS to be fixed there.

Debian has just released Bullseye and therefore there are going to be many
uploads to unstable which may be *much* more unstable than of recent.

I suspect the Debian maintainer's answer may be that this merely uncovers a bug
in the packages which use tempfile (which has been deprecated for a while) and you should bug them
directly. Indeed the x11-common has already been reported[1]. So reassigning
this particular case.

Please report other cases to the relevant BTS.

Thanks

Mark

[1]  https://bugs.debian.org/992385